President Obama’s War on Fun

It’s a high-pressure job, the presidency. Think about how badly
the bin Laden raid could have gone. The worst case scenario — Navy
SEALs trapped in a firefight with Pakistani forces — could have
made “Black Hawk Down” look like a cakewalk.

Yet the night after he gave the “go” order, President Obama hit
the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and had to grin his way
through canned laugh lines working over “the Donald.”

Stressful! You couldn’t blame the guy if he wanted to take the
edge off with a smoke. Alas, he quit a year ago. It was “a personal
challenge for him,” the first lady explained recently, and she
never “poked and prodded.”

You’re not a real
president until you fight a metaphorical ‘war’ on a social
problem.

Of course not. It’s obnoxious to hector your loved ones. “Poking
and prodding” is what good government does to perfect strangers.
And that’s what the Obama administration has been doing, with
unusual zeal, for the past 2 1/2 years.

You’re not a real president until you fight a metaphorical “war”
on a social problem. So, to LBJ’s “War on Poverty” and Reagan’s
“War on Drugs,” add Obama’s “War on Fun.” Like the “War on Terror,”
it’s being fought on many fronts:

Smoking: Last fall, the killjoy crusaders at Obama’s Food and
Drug Administration released proposed “graphic warning labels” on
cigarettes, including “one showing a toe tag on a corpse” and
another where “a mother blows smoke on her baby.” In December, a
federal court rebuffed the administration’s plan to squelch
“e-cigarettes,” which allow smokers to ingest nicotine vapor
without carcinogens or secondhand smoke. But the president’s
lifestyle cops stand ready to regulate menthols, because, like
clove cigarettes (banned in 2009), they taste good, so people might
like them.

Alcohol: Similar logic drove the FDA’s November ban on
caffeinated malt liquors. Capitalizing on a minor moral panic over
“Four Loko,” which packs less punch than the ever-popular Red Bull
and vodka, the agency threatened four companies with “seizure of
the products” on the dubious grounds that caffeine becomes an
“unsafe food additive” when combined with alcohol.

Poker: Last month, the Department of Justice shut down five
major online poker sites, seizing their domain names, issuing
arrest warrants for executives and seeking billions of dollars in
asset forfeiture. One defendant faces jail time of up to 65 years
for helping people play cards over the Internet.

Food: A year ago, Obama’s FDA announced its plan to “adjust the
American palate to a less salty diet,” ratcheting down the amount
of sodium allowed in processed foods. It’s “a 10-year program,” an
agency source said, designed to change “embedded tastes in a whole
generation of people.” But even “real food” aficionados who shun
Cheetos aren’t safe from the reformers’ zeal. On April 20, FDA
agents and federal marshals carried out a 5 a.m. raid on an Amish
farm in Pennsylvania, the culmination of a yearlong sting operation
aimed at wiping out the scourge of unpasteurized milk. “It is the
FDA’s position that raw milk should never be consumed,” an agency
spokeswoman insisted.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that “of all tyrannies, a tyranny
exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Rulers who just want to exploit us may relax once their greed’s
sated.

But “those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end, for they do so with the approval of their own
conscience,” Lewis said.